By Amanda Sebestien

Customer Review

I
came expecting a work of solidarity and memory - a useful, some times
moving record of a movement of women in the recent past. It would be a
fine text for gender studies and social anthropology courses, where they
still exist to be taught.

The book is that, of course. But between those respectable covers I found a kind of hand-grenade, primed with wit and fury.

How
had so few of us registered that birth control and safe legal abortion
rights - won for English women in 1967 - are still explicitly denied to
women in Northern Ireland, though the British state still claims it as
part of the UK?

And - though we knew abortion was outlawed yet
the remaining desperate option in the Irish Republic (a situation which
some times seems closer to Colombia or Nicaragua than the rest of the
Catholic EU) - did we know that generations of women were terrorised
with the image of their foetus being agonisingly tortured for all
eternity?That's what the doctrine of Limbo meant, in practice; a
doctrine upheld ruthlessly for six centuries, then dropped by the
present Pope two years ago, without a word of apology to the generations
of women whose lives it had ruined.

Women denied birth control
were being forced to view themselves as worse than murderers if they
used abortion. One result was infanticide , and tragic attempts to
baptise both smothered infants and the aborted embryos which were on the
same level of life in the eyes of the Church.

An 'underground
railroad' of Irishwomen in London formed in 1981, ready to help some of
the estimated 6,500 women per year forced to cross the sea and struggle
across a strange city, seeking a clinic to terminate their pregnancies.

The
stories are all here: the incest case, the ardently 'British' Unionist
helped by 'Paddies' , the links to Spanish women (once in the same
predicament, now living in a modern secular republic, though always
threatened with reversals by referenda). And the dancing and
demonstrating of a vibrant group of activists, enjoying their freedom
and passing it on.

But the cruelty of so many of these women's
predicaments is breathtaking. The author's own account of her illegal
abortion, before the 1967 Abortion Act, does not flinch. We do, and
realise this cannot and must not go on .

Last year Diane Abbott
MP tried to extend abortion rights to Northern Ireland as part of the
Embryology Bill, but the British government chickened out. And neither
of NI's governing parties , Sinn Fein or the DUP, would attend the
launch of this book in Stormont parliament. But now Ireland's Hidden
Diaspora is going to the Dail in Dublin. I hope it makes an almighty
bang.